What happens when you mix ancient Jewish history, a string of mysterious wedding-night murders, and a very unfortunate encounter with a sparrow? You get the Book of Tobit. In this episode, Daniel takes us on an ancient road trip through the 8th-century BCE Assyrian exile to explore one of the most cinematic stories in the Deuterocanonical tradition.

We follow the righteous but blind Tobit, the cursed Sarah, and the young Tobias as they navigate a world of demons, angelic disguises, and medicinal fish guts. But it’s not just a tall tale—we’re diving deep into the academic and historical bones of the text. From the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism to the groundbreaking textual discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we’ll look at how the "Short" and "Long" versions of this story changed the way we understand divine providence. Whether you’re here for the Archangel Raphael or the critical analysis of Second Temple literature, this episode has something for every thinker.

In this episode, Daniel navigates the "thin places" of the North Atlantic to uncover the gritty reality of Celtic Christianity. We move past the romantic myths to explore a radical world of monastic cities, oar-less voyages, and a philosophy that saw the entire natural world as a visible manifestation of the divine.

From the high-level metaphysics of John Scotus Eriugena to the psychological depth of the Anmchara (Soul Friend), we examine how the "interlace" of the Celtic mind connected the human, the animal, and the sacred. Discover why this ancient, nature-centric expression of faith still haunts our modern imagination.

In this episode:

• Fact vs. Myth: Debunking the Victorian invention of the "Celtic Church."

• Metaphysics: Eriugena’s fourfold division of Nature.

• The Three Martyrdoms: Radical trust in the "Desert of the Sea."

• The Interlace: Visualising the interconnectedness of all things through the Book of Kells.

In this episode of Cogito Ergo Pod, your host Daniel explores the shadows of the early Christian and Jewish imagination. While the canonical Bible provides the foundation for Western views on morality, many of our most vivid images of the Devil, the architecture of Hell, and the nature of betrayal actually stem from the "Expanded Universe"—texts written between the 1st and 4th centuries CE that didn't make the final cut of the New Testament.

We often think of the Bible as a complete manual, but for early believers, there were massive narrative gaps. How did Satan fall? What exactly happens to sinners in the afterlife? What was Jesus like as a child? In this deep dive, we dissect the non-canonical answers to these questions.